Polistra: Good heavens! Meeeerrrrryyy Christmas to you too! Did you just pull Clarence Oddbody out of the river?

Author: No, no, no, not that big. I just got word that my courseware product passed all the beta tests. A year of work and suspense, and it's all done, all good.

Polistra: Wonderful! That's worth a few Yaaaayyys for sure.

Author: Yes indeed. It means we can count on an income for the next three years or so. After that, Social Security should kick in.

Polistra: If the government hasn't collapsed by then.

Author: Yeah. Nothing we can do about that. Well, at least I've done what I can do.

Polistra: Thanks.

Author: You know, I've always been out of phase with The Economy. I was making good money in the late '70s and early '90s, the last two recessions. And I'm doing better than usual this year, in my peculiar minimalist way. By contrast my two down-for-the-count times, around '72 and '96, coincided with boom times for The Economy.

Polistra: Yup, the media always miss that part. Well, they miss everything, but they especially miss that The Economy isn't one uniform blob. Manufacturing has been dropping for twenty years as the Bush and Clinton dynasties handed our production to China. Wasn't the Story, so it didn't count. When high gas prices were the Story, the media told us that everyone was suffering from Pain At The Pump. Well, Oklahoma and Texas loved it. No pain there, just prosperity.

Author: The Story is always told from the viewpoint of the Wall Street Casino. Then they assume, as a Euclidean axiom, that everyone in the country feels the same as the Bettors in the Casino. When the Bettors are coked up, the rest of the country must be coked up. When the Bettors are crashing, the rest of the country must be crashing.

Polistra: It's egalitarianism. Our elites, both the alleged liberals and the alleged conservatives, always start from a leftist mindset. Their deepest and most unshakeable instinct is that all humans are identical. When you start there, you have to conclude that everyone is identical to ME, because otherwise I'm not human. So if I'm living on imaginary money, ready to fall into bankruptcy when the interest rate on my credit cards rises one basis point, then by egalitarian logic I "know" that everyone in the country is living that way, so the most important thing is to keep interest rates negative and keep inflation high.

Author: If we had a real free press, if we had a functioning representative government, the other half of the country would have a voice. The half that understands basic economics, the half that saves and earns interest, the half that would benefit from deflation, the half that wants security more than the thrill of tossing an infinite number of dice into an infinitely deep pile of cocaine.

Polistra: I don't know ... I think something more complicated is going on now, not just the same old broken system. Back in September when this alleged "crisis" started, we were discussing the strange suddenness of Shotgun Paulson's theft. The real-estate stuff, the mortgage frauds that were supposedly the basic problem, had been running for several years, and they didn't really affect most people. Nobody told us why these monstrous sums of imaginary dollars HAD to change hands RIGHT NOW.

Author: Now, five months later, they still haven't told us.

Polistra: Right. It has all the marks of an extortion. In September I wondered if perhaps Russia was the blackmailer. Now I'm not so sure. A simpler hypothesis would be: Sheikh Osama made a deal with Sultan Bush after showing his power on 9/11. Sheikh Osama allowed Sultan Bush to survive, provided he would accomplish the Sheikh's goal of destroying America's economy, industry, culture and armed forces, turning America into a decaying third-rate power like Russia. Sultan Bush carried out this task with perfect efficiency. Just before the end of Sultan Bush's Demolition Derby, the Sheikh demanded a huge amount of cash (laundered through the Wall Street Mafia) to keep the deal secret. And now Obama is paying another ransom through the same channel to continue the deal.

Author: Scary, but I can't poke any holes in it. Sheikh Osama certainly got exactly what he wanted from Bush, which made further attacks unnecessary. And I'm sure he could find a convincing way to tell the whole story if we stop payment.

About Me

Polistra was named after the original townsite of Manhattan (the one in Kansas). When I was growing up in Manhattan, I spent a lot of time exploring by foot, bike, and car. I discovered the ruins of an old mill along Wildcat Creek, and decided (inaccurately) that it was the remains of the original site of Polistra. Accurate or not, I've always liked the name, with its echoes of Poland (an under-appreciated friend of freedom) and stars. ==== The title icon is explained here. ==== Switchover: This 2007 entry marks a sharp change in worldview from neocon to pure populist. ===== The long illustrated story of Polistra's Dream is a time-travel fable, attempting to answer the dangerous revision of New Deal history propagated by Amity Shlaes. The Dream has 8 episodes, linked in a chain from the first. This entry explains the Shlaes connection.